that’s whacked

open source solaris

Sunday, May 2. 2004  –  Category: Sun

Infoworld, in this article claims that Solaris will be open sourced and GPL’d – and they quote none other than our recently-promoted Jonathan Schwartz.

i’m not sure how i feel about it. but that aside, i’m fairly certain this can’t happen. afaik, not all the code in Solaris is even ours. there are bits from AT&T scattered all over the place (from the SVR4 days). not to mention all the technologies licensed to go into Solaris (Postscript for one).

plus, i just can’t see [sun] GPL’ing all our recent hard work and innovative technologies like Zones, DTrace, etc. what do we have to gain by it?

i guess we could always release a neuteured Solaris w/o the licensed techs. and/or recent technologies…. i.e.: release source to an older Solaris (but it couldn’t be GPL’d). but really, what’s the point? that’s like offering your half-eaten moldy sandwich to someone.

sure it’s food, but who the fuck cares? nobody will want to eat it.

anyway, from my near-peon position down as an MTS2 in [sun], i just can’t see the technological or business advantages of open sourcing/GPL’ing Solaris. i think giving Solaris away for FREE is a good idea (which we do, incidently), and giving companies to right to have or examine the Solaris source code (i.e.: to soothe worries about backdoors/etc. similar to Microsoft’s Shared Source program) is fine too…. just don’t GPL it.

like i said in an earlier post….i’ve been brainwashed.